Politics, Religion, and Witch Hunts

I don’t mean to take anything away from Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, but it sometimes seems as if our politicians craft legislation with the sole intent of scoring priceless airtime on the The Colbert Report or The Daily Show. Little wonder these shows are both incredibly popular and enduring: the material just keeps coming.

And, really, you can’t make this stuff up.

Last week, Colbert took Utah Representative (and Buddhist) Curtis Oda (R) to task for his sponsorship of HB 210, which “amends provisions of the Utah Criminal Code relating to animal cruelty and animal torture,” including allowances for “the humane shooting or killing of an animal if the person doing the shooting or killing has a reasonable belief that the animal is a feral animal.”

As for what constitutes “humane” or “reasonable,” that’s anybody’s guess—plenty of grist for Colbert’s mill…

I’ll leave it to others (Stephen Colbert, are you listening?) to poke holes in the theological rationale put forth by Dr. Clayton M. White, professor emeritus at Brigham Young University, and his nameless co-author—but can’t help weighing in on their science:

“In Wisconsin alone, where data are good, about 39 million native animals are killed annually by pet and feral cats.”

That’s right: despite their combined “90 years of work in zoology and conservation,” these two are trying to sell the Wisconsin Study’s estimates as actual data (and, by association, the Wisconsin Study as an actual study).